Strife Takes Aim at Dota 2 and LoL

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S2's latest offers a lot to like.

By Ryan Scott

When it comes to multiplayer online battle arena (henceforth, "MOBA") mindshare, Valve's Dota 2 and Riot Games' League of Legends pretty much own the whole damn pie. But gamers are quick to forget that S2 Games was one of the first players on the scene with Heroes of Newerth, which aimed to bring a one-to-one Defense of the Ancients action-strategy experience to the masses. It seemed like a good idea at the time: Adapt the much-lauded action of WarCraft III's DOTA mod, turn it into a standalone game, and watch the already-rabid community embrace it. Trouble is, these things don't stay still – and Newerth's competitors left it in a distant third place, thanks to their own innovations.

So, S2's gone back to the drawing board and come back with Strife (no relation to the 1996 Doom-engine RPG) -- a more modern MOBA for an audience that demands something other than a straight DOTA clone.

Hearing Strife's team discuss its philosophy, I'd say this game seems to have some very solid design principles behind it. For starters, the in-universe fiction is a serious part of the experience. Strife's heroes live in a world that lies on the cusp of a great evil's enveloping grasp, and its warriors – that is, the heroes you pick at the character-select screen – convene from across a quintet of planes to hone their skills in a practice arena. The idea here is to create context for the combat, with the various regions providing ample design flexibility for an internally consistent world (which is a fancy way of saying that S2 is trying very hard to make their characters and environments mesh well from a visual standpoint).

And Strife features significantly fewer heroes than the average MOBA, too. It's set to launch with just a few dozen, in stark contrast to the 100+ options available in Heroes of Newerth and its competitors. S2 is taking something of a "less is more" approach – which is both noble and very relevant, given the vast burden of knowledge that this genre tends to carry. After all, it's far easier to make a solid hero choice – and get a fundamental grasp on how all the other heroes are going to kill you – when you don't have several hundred skill descriptions to comb through.

The map itself is also notably compacted. While it splits into three lanes like any typical MOBA – with a jungle filling the gaps, and sets of opposing towers lining each stretch of road – the entire map is much smaller, affording teams the freedom to drift between lanes and rush to fight or gank enemies when necessary. A giant golem called Krytos acts as an endgame reward for besting the map's biggest neutral monster (the Baron Nashor equivalent, if you're familiar with League of Legends), and he helps lay waste to a single lane, disabling the first active enemy tower to afford his allies a lane-pushing advantage.

My initial fear with this mechanic is that it might lead to a severe rubber-banding situation – wherein the game gives the losing team a rather lopsided helping hand if they manage to recruit Krytos – but in practice, it seems to be a pretty balanced mechanic that synergizes well with the small map, forces action, and helps to keep games relatively quick. Game length is another sometimes-annoying issue with MOBAs, and while the one game I played lasted a breezy 20 minutes, it's too early to tell whether or not Strife hits the sweet spot.

The sweet spot I'm hoping Strife will hit – or, come as close as possible anyway – is curbing unsavory player behavior. Pre-queue hero picks (in the default non-draft mode, anyway) cuts down on character-select-screen fights, and the various heroes' promised flexibility means that they're adaptable to more than just hard-and-fast lane roles. S2 is also foregoing cross-team chat (something that never adds anything positive to these games anyway), and the post-game Karma system affords better rewards for a crowdsourced thumbs-up from your team, and slim pickings for those who just can't play nice. The notion of offering tangible reward bonuses and penalties based on player behavior is perhaps a more emergent variation on League of Legends' relatively passive Honor system, as it clearly affects game progress, for ill or for worse.

And those sweet post-game treasure chests reward players with resources: pet accessories and crafting materials. The former allows you to grow a swappable stable of familiars, each affording bonuses to different abilities and gameplay styles. Think of it as Strife's simplified analog to League of Legends' mastery trees and rune pages. Crafting materials are used to build items that afford bonuses that last across several games, and can be made permanent with the right materials.

This is where the obligatory microtransaction system comes in, too: Fork over some dough, and you can open an extra chest or two once your match wraps, speeding you along to your next item enchantment or pet purchase. Strife's heroes sport premium cosmetic skins and dye sets too, of course – but unlike many MOBAs, the heroes themselves are always freely available to everyone.

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Unlike many MOBAs, Strife's heroes themselves are always freely available to everyone.

Now, in terms of the actual game itself, it is at once colorful, inviting, intuitive, and fun. I can't comment too much on the in-game UI – suffice it to say that some of the alpha-build wonkiness drove me a little nuts, though that's sure to get fixed – but Strife's world is quite a beautiful one. It's clear that S2 pays very careful attention to things like color palettes, particle effects, and the general way that heroes and their abilities are communicated visually. This is a very hard thing to articulate in words, but mediocre visual design or a poorly communicated particle effect can really botch its associated character's entire in-game identity. Granted, I'm basing this off of a very small vertical slice of the game... but given the things that are on S2's radar, I'm pretty confident that they'll be able to pull off something that's much more visually engaging than most MOBAs.

And, special thumbs-up to support heroes (my favorite role!) – in Strife, they don't get screwed by hobbled gold intake or an expectation to carry an armload of vision wards. Gold rewards for dead creeps get distributed more evenly; solo lanes split half their gold intake with the rest of their team, and duos (that is, the support player and their damage-dealing partner) split everything 50/50. I think it's pretty risky, and I still suspect that this could lead to some degenerative play in terms of metagame role expectations (which is why other games like League of Legends have never gone down this road), but I'm glad that S2 is looking out for support heroes and attempting to make their gameplay decisions as dynamic as the rest of the roles.

And the other pro-support change is the elimination of vision-centric itemization. Instead of carrying wards that you drop in a location of your choice, sight lanterns dot key spots on the map, and – once activated – provide radius vision to the entire team for a limited duration. Again, I think this could lead to some weird and passive gameplay; if I can't drop a ward in the jungle-side brush when I'm in-lane, I'm probably going to avoid that entire area like hot lava. But, again, I hopefully speak for support players 'round the world when I say that we appreciate the extra gold savings (and item slots).

Then again, I'm also thinking about this is very League of Legends-centric terms, which might not be entirely applicable. It's hard to tell – I only played one game versus non-human bots, and watched several more – but at this point, I'm pretty excited about Strife, and that's a first in my post-League of Legends world.

Ryan Scott is a contributing editor to IGN who used to run GameSpy. Keep up with him on Twitter or his website, Geekbox.